Sit/lie: A smart new take

Sometimes it takes an outsider to get the perspective right. Heather Mac Donald, who writes for City Journal, a quarterly magazine about urban affairs, based in New York, has written a long, comprehensive, and provocative piece about San Francisco and the sit/lie debate.

MacDonald is no lefty. Some of her other pieces, for example, have praised the new Arizona immigration law. But she raises some very thorny questions for the opponents of sit/lie and in a thoughtful, intellectually curious city this would be the beginning of some very useful discussion.

Instead, we’re in San Francisco, where we’re much more likely to get sidetracked on fine-tuning the resolution condemning Happy Meals. But that doesn’t mean Mac Donald isn’t scoring points at will here, like in this paragraph about the disconnect between street reality and air castle ideology.

”The homelessness industry instantly mobilized against the Civil Sidewalks law. Its first tactic was to assimilate the gutter punks into the ‘homelessness’ paradigm, so that they could be slotted into the industry’s road-tested narrative about the casualties of a heartless free-market economy.’Homelessness, at its core, is an economic issue,’ intoned the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco’s most powerful homelessness advocacy group, in a report criticizing the proposed law.’People are homeless because they cannot afford rent.’Even applied to the wizened shopping-cart pushers of the traditional ‘homeless’ population, this simplistic statement is deeply misleading.

But applied to the able-bodied Haight vagrants, it is simply ludicrous, entailing a cascading series of misrepresentations regarding the role of choice in youth street culture. The Haight punks may not be able to afford rent, but that is because they choose to do no work and mooch off those who do. Further, they are not looking for housing. They have no intention of settling down in San Francisco or anywhere else. The affordability or unaffordability of rent is thus irrelevant to their condition.”

Now advocates are saying that the silly old sit/lie isn’t of much concern to them, and that they thought about just passing it at the Board of Supervisors (it lost 8-3) but they thought they might as well let it go to the ballot box.

Check out the video from the Stanford School of Art, which was featured in the article. The video includes interviews from Haight Street.